


posthumous -- the biography of a bone

by tin_girl



Category: Historical RPF, Original Work
Genre: F/F, Historical, Romance, World War I, the radium girls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:40:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25773757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: There is, perhaps, some other world where they weren’t lied to and where radium heals – a world where you can eat it with a spoon like you would a yogurt and grow strong, where your skin glows as a sign of health and not as a prelude to disintegration.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	posthumous -- the biography of a bone

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't intend to post this anywhere but why not? I doubt anyone will read it, but if someone does, please consider leaving a comment! :))
> 
> Written because there is no story more horrifying to me than that of the radium girls, and I needed a way to process. Dates/names/events mostly taken from Kate Moore's book on the subject.

I’m a good Christian.

I pray for fresh fruit, an end to the heat. I

never expect a reply. The God I know

lives behind a locked door, and only hoards

His good things. If He has children,

He beats them without fail. If He has neighbors,

He chops apart their houses. Tell me,

who wouldn’t believe.

— Zefyr Lisowski, _Church, 1890_

Body as trap, body as trapdoor to a haunted unreal place.

~ Yrsa Daley-Ward, _The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir_

She meets Theresa Millay on her first day in the plant, Theresa’s elbow constantly knocking into hers. She’s small, Theresa, but clumsy, all limbs, and by the end of the day, everyone has radium all over, but Theresa has it ALL OVER, archangel white.

Well, ‘meets’ is a bit of a stretch anyway. Theresa doesn’t introduce herself for three days, too busy frowning at the watch dials and oblivious to the territorial expansion of her ankle constantly bumping into Felka’s own, a curtain of hair hiding her face from view, curling like something mice would live in and the color of something they’d nibble on. Felka doesn’t watch her (too much) because she needs to show THEM that she’s good at this, and that THEY can let her stay, and there are all the other girls, anyway, introducing themselves, making jokes, ~~and _wasting her time_~~.

(Only there’s this one strand of Theresa’s mess of a hair that curls in the wrong direction, and it drives Felka CRAZY—)

When Felka finally meets Theresa properly, on her third day at the plant, it’s because she’s too nasty for her own good. Her mother always talks of the Devil and threatens Felka with twigs like Felka’s five and asking for a beating, even though she’s already earning money and will soon be able to afford high-heeled shoes, which she won’t buy because whatever for, BUT.

“What on Earth are you _doing_?” she snaps, watching Theresa’s discarded brush rather than Theresa herself.

Theresa doesn’t reply. She doesn’t stop scratching things onto the back of the watch either.

She’s supposed to be _painting_. That’s what they’re here _for._

“What on Earth are you doing?” Felka repeats and moves her feet away from Theresa’s own.

Theresa straightens in her chair, then glances in both directions, like one does before crossing the street. 

“Oh, hello there,” she says once her eyes fall on Felka. “You’re new. _Are_ you new? How long have you been here?”

Felka stares at her, taken aback.

“Do forgive me,” Theresa says hurriedly. There’s a smear of… _something_ on her nose, not radium. Toothpaste, maybe, or melted sugar. “Edna used to sit next to me, and she was a nightmare, so we wouldn’t talk to each other. You know how it is. You smell a bit like her, so I figured… She bit me once, here.”

She presents the faded scar on her wrist with pride, like a war trophy, and Felka stares at the crooked H of her veins under the skin.

“Anyway, I’m engraving my address, so that the soldier who gets this writes to me and we fall desperately in love. He’ll post me poems and he won’t talk about the frontline, and I’ll write him funny anecdotes about my neighbors, which will be made up, of course, because my neighbors are all awful bores, and oh, but I hope he won’t be fifty years old, or ugly, or bald, my soldier. What do you think are the chances?”

Felka knows that the other girls do this sometimes, an address and their name on the back of the watches in hope of future correspondence.

“I bet he’ll be sixty at least, your soldier,” she says meanly and narrows her eyes. Stop hissing like a basilisk, her mother always tells her, and Felka never listens, never stops. “Sixty, yes. He’ll have warts, too, and heavy mustache hanging all the way down to his collarbones, and he’ll only have one arm, too.”

Theresa looks thoughtful for a moment, that one misfit curl sticking to her lip. She has funny lips, too wide for her face, and it makes her look like she’s smiling even when she’s can’t possibly be.

“It’s quite alright, him missing an arm. He is a soldier, after all. As long as it’s not his writing hand … Warts, though! Oh, God no! And a mustache? Have mercy!”

“So it’s fine that he’s sixty, then?”

Theresa glances at the face of her watch, only half-finished, as if there’s no use for the late-morning hours. 

“He’s _not_. He _won’t_ be. He’ll be nineteen, and he’ll have eyes the color of green beer bottles, and he’ll write me panegyrics.”

“You’re delusional,” Felka says, shaking her head. “And they say radium’s good for you!”

Oh, the irony—

“And you’re annoying!” Theresa says, staring at her with delight rather than irritation. Her eyebrows, thick like two caterpillars, disappear under her curls. “Your accent’s funny, too.”

“Shut up,” Felka snaps and feels herself flush a treacherous red. “It is _not_.”

“Uh-huh. So where are you from, then? Germany?”

“ _Germany_!” Felka cries, outraged. “I’m a nowhere girl, from a nowhere place.”

There’s no Poland, after all, the country not only torn to pieces by three vultures but long digested by now, too. GERMANY? In a sense, yes, but God! If only her father heard…

“Well, _I_ ’m from Pennsylvania,” Theresa says proudly, then holds out her hand. Felka stares at it but doesn’t shake it, because touch burns. Not when it’s her four siblings burrowing into her for warmth at night, not then, but oh, does it burn when it’s some girl wasting time scratching her address all over watches instead of lip-pointing.

“What if he comes back, your soldier, and murders you in your sleep?” she says when Theresa keeps smiling and doesn’t drop her hand.

“That’s not very likely, is it?” Theresa says, thoughtful, and keeps her hand there, like a very stupid person, because she is that, a very stupid person. “Still, at least it’d be quite romantic if that happened. Something to write a novel about, if I had the patience.”

Felka decides that she hates Theresa Millay there and then.

*

They glow after a day’s worth of work, something whiter than white and trying at divine, ethereal ghosts skipping down the curb, the hems of their skirts drawing celestial rings in the polluted town air as they spin for joy. They’re angel-beautiful and the Devil Himself couldn’t resist them so He doesn’t, only no one knows it – their teeth, winking like pearls as they laugh in delight, don’t hurt just yet.

Here’s what they don’t realize: when you glow, you’re visible, and sometimes that’s enough invitation for hungry things to come and steal your glorious forever away. 

Here’s what they don’t realize either: when you glow, it’s because inside you, death is screaming, screaming, screaming, excited to have christened its new home.

*

Theresa dreams up a new boy-soldier to love every day. Sometimes they’re sensitive but with a rough exterior, sometimes soft through and through. They write poems about her hair (never mind that they don’t know what it looks like, and really, that’s for the better, Felka thinks, watching the nest escape Theresa’s ribbons), and poems about her fingers, and poems about her very soul, _which blinks at me from the watch face in my darkest hours_ or something mediocre (“poetic, Felicja, poetic!”) like that. They’re slender or broad-chested, their hair either a dark brown or the color of ‘roasted chestnuts’ ( _Christ_ ), but never blond.

“I want dark-haired children,” Theresa explains, tugging at one of her straw-yellow curls, the one that spirals the wrong way. “Three of them, all girls.”

“All girls?!”

“In case the war isn’t finished by then,” Theresa says in a low voice. “And even if it is, who’s to say another won’t follow right after? Girls don’t get drafted, only paint watches, like us, and it’s quite nice, isn’t it? War effort, only safe!”

There are concerns about radium, but it’s all quite silly. It’s beneficial for health, experts say so, and look there, anyway, a girl showing the new workers just how safe it is by eating radium with a spatula, and see how she smiles as she licks off the residue? A milky way on her tongue, all glitter and hope.

Maybe someday, they’ll even rub it into wounds, and there won’t be as many soldiers who only get to keep their watches for two, three nights before they’re shot dead.

“What if it’s not an arm your soldier loses?” Felka says, sly. “What if it’s his, _you know_.”

Theresa thinks about it, doesn’t blush.

“That’s fine,” she decides with a careless shrug. “I’ll love him for his personality, of course.”

“As long as he doesn’t have warts,” Felka reminds her, wry.

“Yes, naturally.”

Felka doesn’t get through as many watches as she would her first three days at the plant even though she’s better at painting the dials now, and it’s all Theresa’s fault.

“Why don’t you write your name?” she asks anyway once silence falls between them, more comfortable than Felka would like. “You only ever put your address on them.”

“Oh, come now,” Theresa laughs. “Theresa? Who’d daydream about kissing me, with a name like that?”

“I don’t know,” Felka says. “I hear they’re desperate there, in the trenches. No one at all to kiss, only other wart-covered men and rats.”

What’s wrong with Theresa’s name anyway?

“I thought I could pick myself a nicer one, for the watches, you know? Hazel or Minnie or! Only then they’d learn _eventually_ , wouldn’t they? What with the wedding vows, I mean.”

For her wedding day, Theresa will wear her mother’s dress, even though it’s two sizes too big. In sickness and in health, because she will love her soldier even if he’ll have only one arm, or only one leg, or only one arm _and_ only one leg.

“I think I could even love him if he had _no_ arms, you know,” she told Felka once, grave and busy chewing on her hair.

“Oh, but how would he hold you then?” Felka blurted out, and, for some reason, Theresa looked down, at where their ankles were, as always, pressed together.

“It’s quite simple, really,” she said and smiled, half-happy, half-sad. “I’d hold _him_ instead.”

It ached, like a rotting tooth.

Oh, _the irony_.

*

She’s careless with lip-pointing, Theresa. She daydreams too much, lets the brush hover, radium all over her lip as she thinks of her beer-bottle-eyed soldier boy loving her for how the address she scratched onto his watch slants to the left, like a fence refusing to collapse.

*

The other girls aren’t all that different from Theresa. They, too, wear ribbons, put radium on their nails, and talk about boys, but it’s only Theresa that Felka can’t stand.

There’s Elena, come from Italy at three and nimble-fingered, so good at watch-painting that she can chatter for most of her shifts and still be faster than half the other girls. She sings sad ballads, a line or two from each, heard on the radio and half-remembered, and she likes braiding Felka’s hair, because she says it’s silky-smooth, life burying her hands in sand. She tells poor jokes and likes men with beards, but only if the beards are short and neat. She never returns library books on time and Felka takes to returning them for her, after having read them herself. 

There’s Alice, who wears a cross but swears like a soldier, how very unladylike, and always keeps her chin held up high, even when painting. She dreams of being an actress and playing the love interest to someone handsome and famous, only she claims it’s a lost cause because she was born with one leg shorter than the other. Felka scrutinizes her once as Alice spins slowly around, hands raised as if in alarm, and she can’t see the asymmetry and doubts a camera would, too, but she takes Alice’s word for it. Perhaps the circus will have me, Alice says sometimes, and laughs at people’s obvious discomfort.

Finally, there’s Hazel, who doesn’t talk much, but smiles at everyone whether they deserve it or not. She knits Felka a scarf come autumn, and it’s so soft and pretty – white, with golden beads sewn into the fabric – that Felka is tempted to wear it indoors. She hates wasting radium, Hazel, and always stares at it mesmerized. It takes her longer than anyone else to arrive at the plant each morning, shoes always mud-stained (she cleans them with tissues before walking in, loath to track dirt) and bag full of baked goods for everyone to share.

*

The war ends, and Theresa’s dresses get prettier and prettier every day.

“Dressed like that, and to work,” one of the girls scoffs, and, later, Felka purposefully makes her trip as the girl’s walking through a door, faking an innocent expression.

The war ends, and not everyone can stay. Theresa doesn’t seem to mind, swinging her legs after climbing a barstool when they go out for drinks, flashing her radium-brilliant smile even though if anyone’s to be laid off, it’s her, with her laz— slow pace and address-scratching.

In the end, neither of them can stay. Felka gets a job as a typist, and even works with Helen Quinlan from the plant, and Theresa starts working in a library, of all places.

“Yes, I have read more than three books in my life, thank you very much,” she grumbles when Felka teases her.

“All great romances, I’m sure,” Elena laughs, because they’re still friends, even though they don’t all work together anymore.

The first few months, it’s not that strange, introducing Theresa as a ‘colleague from work’ or even a ‘friend from work’ to people, Theresa’s arm hooked with hers and her smile still otherworldly, even with no radium residue caked on her lips, but it gets ridiculous once a year passes.

“Why do you still say that about her, ‘Theresa from work?’” Felka’s youngest brother demands, drowning in the sweater Felka clumsily knitted for him three sizes too big, so that it’d last him at least a few seasons. “You _don’t_ work together. You _lie._ ”

“We _used_ to work together,” Felka reminds him. He stares at her with huge eyes, unimpressed. He knows all the noun cases for his own name in Polish, never mind that here, in the land of dreams come true, he doesn’t need to know how to say ‘Filip’ in seven different ways. “It’s just that I didn’t think I’d still get to see her, after the plant.”

She frowns at how honest it comes out.

Filip nods as if he understands. Maybe he does, seven years old and already helping with chores and reciting the alphabet backward. 

“Just say ‘my friend,’” he advises. “‘My friend Tereska.’”

The next time someone looks at her expectantly, before she can stop herself, Felka says, “And this is my menace, Theresa.” It’s fine. She only has to introduce Theresa to someone once a few weeks, since she hardly knows anyone. Usually, it’s her who’s being introduced, and it’s always exaggerated mockery on Theresa’s part, “And this, my dear, is the radium of my very heart, Felicja Hrycyk.”

Oh, THE IRONY.

For all her talk of boys, Theresa is in no hurry to get married, even though three boys offer, one per season. She tells Felka all about it, feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons, how one’s mustache was unfashionable, how one thought himself too smart, and one thought himself too stupid with such conviction that Theresa had no choice but to take his word for it and, well, refuse.

“He had nice hands, though,” she tells Felka with a wink and then runs between the pigeons, laughing gleefully as they startle into flight, grabbing for feathers.

Later, on her way home, Felka trips, busy examining her hands, and refuses to think about why she’d do that, swearing at her scraped knee.

*

In October 1920, Theresa tells Felka all about kissing some boy who’s neither too smart nor too stupid (“no mustache, either, so far!”) and radium waste is sold to schools and playgrounds, placed in kids’ sandboxes.

Later, a little boy tells his mother that his hands are burning, burning, _burning_ , but it’s fine because von Sochocky, so respectable and trustworthy with his ‘von,’ and his drooping mustache, and his suit jacket, says it’s healthy, really, for children to play with radium. The man _clearly_ knows what he’s talking about – surely, otherwise, his words wouldn’t go to print? Surely, otherwise, someone would counter it?

~~Surely, not _everyone_ can be bought—~~

The boy cries, but the mother tells him to play in the sandbox anyway. There’s no way she’s saying no to free radium for her kid once she’s been assured of its healing properties. It is, after all, ‘more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths.’

The boy knows better. He watches other kids play with the new sand that looks so much like something come from the moon, and stays away.

*

They’ve known each other for five years when Theresa brings news of Mollie Maggia’s death. Felka remembers Mollie, of course, one of the company’s fastest workers, always laughing with Eleanor Eckert, pretty enough. She knew everyone by name, and she was one of the few girls who bothered talking to Felka, even though talking to her was always either like talking to a wall or like deliberately placing your finger in a pencil sharpener, as Alice once summed it up. 

“I’m going to the funeral,” Theresa announces, staring off into space. For once in her life, she looks determined, and it’s quite— It’s quite scary. “You should, too.”

Felka sighs. Theresa is in the habit of collecting funerals. A merry girl like her, and yet she goes to one every month because she happens to hear of the deaths of people she briefly knew months or even years before and thinks it reason enough to go. Not only that – sometimes she’ll go to the funerals of people she never met, too, stopping by a church and glancing inside to see how many are attending and staying if she deems the number too small. Felka thought it misplaced pity until, one day, Theresa came over to her crowded excuse for a house crying about some sixty-three years old Arnold whom she hadn’t known, blowing her nose into her sleeve because she’d run out of tissues.

“I just can’t bear it, Fel,” she sobbed later, collapsed in Felka’s lap and soaking her skirt with tears. “How does one _bear_ it?”

“If you’re crying this much over some old man you never even met, imagine what you’ll be like once someone you love dies.”

She had never been tactful, Felka.

“No one I love will ever die,” Theresa said with stubborn conviction, then sobbed some more. “They’re not allowed to.”

Felka almost asked back then. Almost said, _am_ I _allowed to?_

“We hardly even knew her,” she tells Theresa now.

Theresa arches an eyebrow, and, just like that, with no words, she’s already won the argument of course.

*

The funeral is a small event, for fear of whispers.

“Syphilis, apparently,” Felka says, and can’t help but doubt it.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Theresa says, almost vicious. “ _Nothing_.”

She’s mistaken, of course. Shame will cling to Mollie’s grave longer than the flowers will last, feeding on the scraps of gossip.

“Wrong or not,” Felka says, thoughtful, “It doesn’t sound like Mollie, does it?”

“No,” Theresa agrees and doesn’t cry.

She cries later, once they’ve waved a sad goodbye to the family and walked off a distance.

“oh, Fel,” she says, the tears huge like something from a fairy tale. Felka catches one with her sleeve as it falls off Theresa’s cheek and then keeps catching them, because, somehow, she can’t stand the thought of them hitting the dirty sidewalk, where a half-torn newspaper advertises radium as the magical cure-all.

“I know,” Felka says, and wonders if she sounds cold.

(She knows, of course, that she sounds cold always, ALWAYS.)

“Oh _God_ ,” Theresa sobs, and Felka doesn’t know how to comfort her, doesn’t try an embrace, but when Theresa clings to her arm, she stands there and lets her.

(Later, she catches herself chewing on the hem of her sleeve only because it’s unexpectedly salty, the taste of sadness itself.)

*

One summer, Felka’s younger sister falls off a tree branch and breaks a bone. It sticks out from her arm, having torn through tissue, and Felka doesn’t waste time staring at it, already running for help, but she thinks of it later, in the middle of the night, sleepless and sleep-starved.

Surely, she thinks, a crack like that is the worst that can happen to a bone.

Surely.

She said a prayer for Mollie Maggia, and she knows about the syphilis diagnosis, but she doesn’t know this: an exasperated dentist prodding at Mollie’s jaw, and the whole bone coming off in his hands.

*

They’re out on a walk, and, for once, the sky is all stars. Felka shouldn’t be out so late, because who’ll put the little ones to sleep? Certainly not her mother, busy taking care of everything else in the world, Atlas weary of holding up the sky and sneakily propping it on her shoulders instead.

Still, it’s easy to linger, with Theresa’s shoes merrily clicking something that’s almost a melody on the sidewalk. Theresa invites it, radiant even without radium, and when she squeaks at the accidental brush of Felka’s cold hands and grabs them in order to warm them, Felka lets her.

“I don’t ever want to know any constellations,” Theresa tells her, staring up at the night sky and gently blowing on Felka’s fingers. Felka shivers, and thank God for the cold, thank God for how she can pretend that’s the reason, that and her old coat. “I like the sky accidental, and I like unplotted, unexpected things, and I like secret patterns more than those everyone knows and recognizes.”

“That doesn’t sound like someone who scratches their address on watches.”

“It doesn’t, does it?” Theresa says with a nostalgic smile. “But Felka, haven’t you noticed? It’s been years.”

 _When she was small_ , Theresa’s mother told Felka once, Theresa knocking chairs over in a hurry, grabbing for her purse, _she said, ‘mom, the stars, can I eat them?’_.

“It’s been years, and yet you’re still turning boys away,” Felka says because she ruins things like that. Once, she got a beautiful Christmas bauble as a gift, painted gold and purple, and broke it only because she couldn’t stand the constant fear that it would break.

“None of them are my one-armed soldier, see,” Theresa says simply. “None of them have beer-bottle-colored eyes.”

“Isn’t it enough for someone to simply love you?” Felka says, inexplicably angry. She stares at her shoes rather than at the stars and feels inadequate. “Surely, it’s enough for someone to simply love you.”

“But I don’t need it that much, to be loved,” Theresa says after a moment’s deliberation. “I’m more concerned with having someone _to_ love.”

“And don’t you?” Felka snaps, furious and trying (failing) to hide it. “Don’t you, by now?”

She’s been waiting for this too, just like she used to wait for that Christmas bauble to break, Theresa saying yes to someone at last.

“You think me spoiled,” Theresa guesses and rises to her tiptoes for one, two, three seconds. “I’m not resentful of the world, you know, for not granting me my wish, and so it’s unfair.”

“I don’t think you spoiled,” Felka says, automatic. “I only— Say, what would you do if you knew death was coming for you? You’re walking through the world and you know that death is on your track, only a few paces behind. Would you run?”

“Of course I would,” Theresa says, and she sounds like her mother did when she told Felka, _I looked at her, and I couldn’t bear to tell her that it would hurt, trying to eat the stars._ “That’s what life’s all about, isn’t it? Running from death. What, you wouldn’t?”

“I’d turn around,” Felka confesses, stuffing her hands into her pockets to save some of that warmth that Theresa rubbed into her skin, for later. “I’d turn around and I’d run to meet it, just to get it over and done with.”

“Too bad, sweet Fel,” Theresa whispers, with a smile too sad for her to mean it, and cups her palm over Felka’s cheek. “When death falls in love, it’s usually one-sided.”

“Oh,” Felka says, stupidly. “Oh, but—”

“Do run at death, then,” Theresa says, stuffing her own hands down her pockets. “So that you don’t ever die.”

She says it watching the stars, and Felka has always hated the world, but she loves it a little now, when she thinks of all the radium they’ve tracked all over town, her and Theresa, that miracle dust shaken off their clothes and smiles, dropping to the ground to form the shapes of how, before they could know it, it must have already been decided that they’d have years together, every boy’s eyes blue, or grey, or brown, but never green. 

*

It’s something people will eventually remember, this Trojan Horse of an ambush invited into the bones of girls too young for it, though who could ever be old enough?

It’s something people will forget, too, because everyone’s equal in death, and bones remain, only do they really, when you rid them of calcium until they crumble to dust?

*

“Do you know,” Theresa says one day, poking at her cheek. “My tooth has been hurting.”

“Oh. How often?”

“See, here’s the thing,” Theresa says and lowers her voice, smiling sheepishly, such a brave thing. “It never actually stops.”

*

“Say,” Felka’s mother prompts one day, combing out Felka’s hair, “when are you going to find yourself a husband?”

“Find myself a husband!” Felka scoffs, flinching at the cruel tugging of the hairbrush. “They don’t sell them in kiosks, you know, and even if they did, I bet I could never afford one!”

Her mother clicks her tongue and pinches her cheek.

“With a mouth like this, it’s no wonder no one wants you.”

Just then, Felka HATES her.

“It’s fine,” she says, stubborn. “I delight in being unwanted.”

“I didn’t raise you this strange,” her mother sighs, burying her nose in Felka’s hair. “When in doubt, look to nature. Bees sting, too, and it’s all good and well, except they die right after.”

Felka can’t help but laugh at that because oh, if only Theresa heard! After all, death himself wouldn’t want Felka either.

*

Death might not want her, but it wants others, always hungry, never full.

“It hurts when I walk,” Theresa says, looking small and miserable where she’s curled up on the curb, refusing to take one step more. “It hurts in my very bones.”

Felka stands next to her, waiting to be of help, and refuses to cry at this funeral of all her biggest fears and all her biggest hopes.

*

Felka never makes a list of the ten people she loves the most in the world, because she doesn’t love enough people for a list like that, and because Theresa would be on the list.

*

The last time they go out, they have coffee with Hazel and Alice, and Theresa keeps her scarf wound around her neck and pulled up to her nose.

It smells when I talk, she confessed quietly earlier, when Felka pulled on it. She blushed red, and it broke Felka a little, because oh, that’s not how it should be. Theresa should only blush for dark-haired boys who’d promise her three daughters and no wars, and not in shame.

“Your teeth?” Alice says, sipping on her espresso. “I’m sure it’s nothing. My knee’s been hurting too, you know, only I bet it’s the shorter leg finally catching up with me.”

Theresa smiles and asks Hazel about her knitting, and Felka stays quiet and thinks of how it isn’t nothing, Theresa’s toothache, not at all.

*

“Lip, dip, paint,” Theresa whispers when Felka visits her one day and piles blankets on top of her small form, as if that’s any help, as if what’s wrong with Theresa is as simple as a cold. “Lip, dip, paint, lip, dip, paint, lip, dip, paint.”

Nobody knows what’s wrong, but Theresa looks amused, like she’s guessed it.

“Oh, Fel! But remember how I’d put it on my eyelids, and trail it on my hair? Oh, what a relief that I don’t particularly want to kill all of them, and only want to sleep instead, because if I did, I’d hardly have the strength.”

She holds her arms up but lets them drop halfway through, limp like a rag doll.

“I suppose they’ll say it was syphilis for me, too,” she says, thoughtful. “I don’t mind, honest. I’ve been bad, lying to everybody for years, and so I quite deserve it, only I can’t bear that they did it to Mollie, you know? I just can’t _stand_ it. It’s rotten and— _ha_. That’s what the doctor says is happening to my teeth! They’re _rotting_. Seems like it’s not dust shaken off angels’ wings, after all, radium.”

Then, quieter:

“Seems like there must not be any angels, in a world like ours.”

*

“Tess?”

“Mmm?”

“So you’re fine with your soldier having no arms?”

“I already told you I didn’t care.”

“Yes, only I wonder…”

“Yes?”

“Well, what if both of you would have no arms?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you couldn’t hold him, then, and he couldn’t hold you either.”

“…”

“I suppose we’d just lie side by side, pretending to have hands.”

“Hey, what’s this? Are you crying?”

“…”

“Please, don’t. Don’t cry anymore, Tessie.”

“Never mind holding, Fel! Now, no one would even kiss me!”

*

 _I_ would, Felka says, like a coward, into the inner pocket of her coat later, on her way home.

I would kiss you.

*

“They warn you about boys that will break your heart,” Theresa says, thoughtful rather than bitter, “but they never mention men who wear gloves to protect themselves from the very thing they’re telling you to put inside your mouth. Funny, that.”

Somehow, neither of them laughs.

*

“You don’t want to kill them?” Felka says one day, getting up from the edge of Theresa’s bed and putting on her shoes. “Fine! _I_ will.”

“Oh, Fel.”

“Shsh, shut up. I’ll talk to someone and I’ll – I’ll tell the world and I’ll –“

“Only can it wait?” Theresa begs, voice sweeter than ever even though her breath’s turned sour. “Can you, for a little while yet, not go hate the whole world but stay and—”

“Stay and?” Felka prompts, whirling around to face her. It’s like a slap, the sight of Theresa propped up on her lumpy pillow, her face a map drawn in pain and that one stupid, stupid strand of her hair still stubbornly curling the wrong way. Felka, so good at self-sabotage, runs into her death headfirst. “Stay and love you?”

Theresa looks away, a blush spilling on her cheeks, and it makes her look so alive that Felka almost screams.

“It’s all right,” Theresa says, shy. “I know that you don’t.”

Felka stares, and can’t remember any constellations.

“But I do,” she says and feels like she’s holding something fragile in her hands, about to let go. “I _do_ love you, and it’s accidental, because I never meant to, but that’s fine because you— you said you liked accidental things.”

This, out in the open now, even though she kept it tucked inside her bones for years, and she trembles like a released string.

“Do you really?” Theresa says, eyes lighting up, those frog lips of hers stretched wider than Felka’s ever seen them. “Oh, do you really?”

“What are you all happy for?” Felka mumbles, puzzled. “I’m hardly a soldier boy with beer-bottle eyes.”

“Well, I don’t know about the boy part,” Theresa says, amused, “but haven’t you noticed? Your _eyes_ , idiot. They’re _green_. That’s why I said that, about beer bottles, all those years ago.”

“Oh.”

“ _Oh_. So what will it be, then?”

“I’ll stay,” Felka says, breathing around how the whole world’s rearranged. “I’ll— shoes.”

She takes them off and perches on the edge of the bed, her bones all fear and love and god only knows what else.

*

Once, despite appearances, Theresa was someone you could lean on. Now, Felka wouldn’t dare, for fear that Theresa’s bones would crumble to dust under her weight.

Once, Theresa was someone you could lean on, and now, Felka is her bones, standing straight for the both of them.

*

Theresa’s mother lets Felka in because she always lets Felka in. She must know, by now, because it’s all over Theresa’s face no matter how hard Felka herself tries to hide it, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She makes Felka tea every time without fail, because she wants her daughter happy, and God has no say in making her so.

“I have no use for God, anyhow,” she tells Felka once. “Look what he’s doing to my little girl.”

Felka doesn’t tell her that it’s mustached men rather than God, because who knows, perhaps it’s all the same.

In Theresa’s room, she frames her face with her hands.

“But isn’t your mouth cold?”

“My mouth,” Theresa tries to say without opening it, “is death.”

“And I run towards death, remember?”

Theresa smiles, a crooked thing, broken in half by how her teeth hurt more than ever.

“Only don’t stop loving me.”

“This soon?” Felka says, scandalized. “Give yourself a little credit!”

Theresa giggles like a small girl, and Felka thinks that it would be quite lovely if people could grow younger instead of older, shrinking inside griefs and illnesses until they’d step out of them like from too loose clothes piled at their feet.

“Well, then, my lips! How terribly cold they are, Fel! Whatever shall I do?”

Felka smiles and leans in.

*

Use your lips, not cloths, because too much radium goes to waste, and oh-oh, we can’t have that!

Oh, von Sochocky, Felka thinks, vicious. If I saw you now, your jaw wouldn’t have to be full of holes for me to tear it out.

*

Theresa’s mouth rots, but it bleeds, too.

She talks anyway.

“I should have known better! I work at a _library_! _Of course_ that not everything that’s printed is true!”

She’s been hurt by the world, Theresa, and Felka thinks it’s like those watches. She’d lovingly scratch her address onto them and she didn’t mind that the love was never returned – for her, it was enough to give. Similarly, she doesn’t mind her love for the world remaining unrequited, but this revolt of bones? The world’s betrayed her, like a soldier sending a letter full of insults instead of remaining indifferent, and she can’t understand it, too good to comprehend evil to the very end.

“I feel it eating my bones,” she tells Felka in a furtive whisper. “I can feel it _munching_ on them.”

“No, you can’t.”

“I can even _hear_ it,” she insists, putting her forearm to Felka’s ear. “Here, listen.”

“Shsh.”

“Poor mommy. She’ll have to sell her wedding dress now.”

Felka kisses her on the forehead and doesn’t have the heart to remind her that, radium or not, Theresa would never get to wear the dress anyway, with how she keeps insisting that she loves Felka forever, backward and forwards in time.

*

“You have to run from death, soldier,” Felka hisses in her ear when Theresa sleeps, fitful. “Run, and run, and don’t ever stop.”

*

“You’re never home anymore,” Filip tells her one day, mournful.

“Soon,” Felka says, and bursts out crying, “I’ll be home all the time.”

He offers her the sweater she knitted for him, and because it’s too big for him, it fits her just fine.

*

“I wanted three girls, but I think it’s for the best that I won’t have children at all,” Theresa tells her one day, staring numbly at the ceiling. “It’s not enough to survive, after all, being a girl.”

“But what are you saying?” Felka whispers and kisses her fingers. “You’ve been surviving for months.”

“Yes, fine, but surviving disgusts me,” Theresa says, dismissive. “Do you know, when I was small, I wanted to eat the stars.”

Felka desperately wants to take all her pain away, and it must be love, the real thing, because here’s a secret she hasn’t dared tell anyone: by now, she has plenty of her own.

*

There is, perhaps, some other world where they weren’t lied to and where radium heals – a world where you can eat it with a spoon like you would a yogurt and grow strong, where your skin glows as a sign of health and not as a prelude to disintegration. Close your eyes and maybe you’ll be able to dream it up, girls spinning down sidewalks like humming-tops and never coming to a stop, their laughter an opera that someone will scribble down on their knee, waiting for a bus and watching them glitter happy.

Here’s a story of a girl: she’s born, she hates, she loves, she dies, she rots – that’s how it always goes, isn’t it?

Except no, because she’s a radium girl, and so she’s born, she hates, she loves, she rots, and then she dies and the state of her – when they bury her six feet under, you could swear she’s already been in the grave.

*

“I don’t think it’s because one of my legs is shorter than the other,” Alice tells her over the last coffee they’ll ever drink together, though neither of them knows it yet.

“Oh, Alice,” Felka sighs, wrapping her hands around the mug, for warmth, because she can’t ever help her hands getting cold, no matter how much Theresa blows on them before she lets Felka leave. “I have a toothache, and it never stops.”

*

Always unwanted, when Felka seduces death at last, it’s quite accidental.

*

“I’m going to die soon,” Theresa says into the dark in the middle of the night, when neither of them can sleep. “I’m going to die soon, and wherever I end up, I want three things.”

Felka squeezes her hand, and GOD, GOD, GOD.

“See, if there’s an afterlife, I hope there’s no white there, and that nothing glows, and that there’ll be someplace I’ll get to sit and wait for you, a bench of some sort, since I hope I’ll be waiting for quite some time, and that you’ll have a lot to tell me about when you do join me.”

Felka opens an umbrella above their heads, to shield them from God, because He must be spiteful, and if He hears what Theresa wants of Heaven, He surely won’t let her have it her way.

*

“Mom,” she says the day it all ends, collapsing in the doorway to their matchbox of a house and marveling at how something is still stubbornly keeping her bones together. “Mom, did you know? A break is not the worst thing that can happen to a bone after all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading <3


End file.
